5) farming remains the biggest employer at 3.4m, with the gov/mil second at just under 700k (guess that's no million-man army then), followed by education, machine manufacturing, textiles and coal mining. 40k work in electronics.

After saying it's "magical thinking" to expect NorKo to collapse, or for China to step up, or for negotiations to stop Pyongyang's nuclear cowboying-up, the Globe makes a strong pitch for an aggressive soft-kill:

The only way to get North Korea to reverse course, short of war, is to reconcile with it - ending enmity through robust political, economic and cultural engagement, investment and aid, security assurances, normalization of relations, and, above all, a peace treaty ending the Korean war.

I like anything that's aggressive against the war-criminal Kim regime. I think an aggressive opening-up campaign would be highly destabilizing for the regime, and that we'd trigger a crisis point faster that way than what we've done for the last two decades.

RIAA maybe seeking death penalties, sexy

A federal appeals court is ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 — $750 a track — for file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader.

The lower court had granted her an “innocent infringer’s” exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum of $750 per track because she said she didn’t know she was violating copyrights and thought file sharing was akin to internet radio streaming.

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA is winding down its 6-year-old litigation campaign targeting individual file sharers and instead is working with internet service providers to adopt rules that could cut off or hinder internet access to copyright scofflaws.

The first RIAA case to go to trial against an individual concerned Jammie Thomas. A Minnesota jury ordered the woman to pay $1.92 million for file sharing 24 songs. The judge in the case reduced the award to $54,000 — $2,250 a track.

The second case concerns Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University grad student who a jury ordered to pay $675,000 for file sharing 30 tracks last year. Tenenbaum has asked the judge in the case to lower the award. A decision is pending.

Iran working on nuke, 02.27.10

Iran working on nuke, 02.27.10

Iran moved nearly its entire stockpile of low-enriched nuclear fuel to an above-ground plant.

That mystery is the subject of fervent debate among many who are trying to decode Iran’s intentions. The theories run from the bizarre to the mundane: Under one, Iran is actually taunting the Israelis to strike first. Under another, it is simply escalating the confrontation with the West to win further concessions in negotiations. The simplest explanation, and the one that the Obama administration subscribes to, is that Iran has run short of suitable storage containers for radioactive fuel, so it had to move everything.

Since October, when Iran agreed in principle to ship much of its nuclear stockpile out of the country so that it could be converted to fuel for a medical reactor, there have been a series of unexplained actions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has veered from hailing the deal to backing away from it. The country has declared that it will soon build 10 new enrichment plants — a number it does not have the capacity to carry out.

The report said that on Feb. 14, with inspectors present, the Iranians moved roughly 4,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of deep underground storage to the small plant that they have declared they will use to re-enrich the fuel to 20 percent purity. (It takes 80- to 90-percent purity to make a weapon, a relatively small technological leap from 20 percent.)

Our sources say that the low-enriched uranium is virtually useless for anythingbut running an energy plant. Its all contaminated and unusable for weapons purposes.Internet Anthropologist Think Tank: Iran Epic nuke fail?If this is true there is no point in attacking that product.And it also frees up underground space for new non-contaminated3% uranium, which they can spin into weapons grade product.

They lost many of their centrifuges when they tried to usethe contaminated product.Maybe as many a third of the centrifuges were destroyed.

( Jesus, lets get someone in there that knows what the hell they are talking about. G )

"The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said."

MY COMMENTS IN CAPS FOR EASE OF READING. G

IF THEY WAIT FOR THE PRESIDENT TO INITIATE SOMETHING THEN ITS ALREADY TOO LATE.

THERE IS NO WAY TO ENSURE KEY FED OR PRIVATE SERVICES WILL REMAIN ON LINE,

ITS JUST BULL SHIT.

THEY ARE MAKING STUFF UP. G

Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.

YES THEY WALKED RIGHT THROUGH THE BEST SECURITY IN THE USA AND NO BODY COULD STOP THEM. GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, DOD, STATE DEPT. ETC.

Cryptome GONE

Cryptome needs to sue Network Solutions over this..We can’t keep having DNS and hosting providers cutting off services whenever some company files a DMCA complaint..There are proper legal procedures in place to deal with DMCA takedown requests, Network Solutions did not follow them and showed their disdain for their customers..I for one with never buy a product from Network Solutions again.

by: Zenc | 02/25/10 | 12:45 am |

NetSol actually locked the domain name, so it can’t be moved until after this dispute is resolved…

Update: Like all service providers, Microsoft must respond to lawful requests from law enforcement agencies to provide information related to criminal investigations. We take our responsibility to protect our customers privacy very seriously, so have specific guidelines that we use when responding to law enforcement requests. In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed. We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document’s removal.Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/#ixzz0gbLMd8qJ